Ken Dixon: The budget: A view from inside

Updated 5:29 pm, Saturday, February 9, 2013

Here's the way you explain the governor's budget proposal to the casual taxpayer. It's in trendy vampire terms.

At this point in the lingering recession, your soft neck is oh so vulnerable, as you sit there, waiting for an undead state-government functionary to tear it out and leave you a bloodless corpse, without even the benefit of eternal life, so you can keep paying taxes forever.

That's the foresight of government.

First off, the two-year, $43.8 billion budget is more like $41 billion, except there's this entity called the Special Transportation Fund, which diverts revenues from gas taxes and such for highway projects (remember the Mianus River bridge collapse on I-95 in Greenwich back in June 1983?), unless the governor proposes raiding the fund for nearly $390 million in operating expenses. He also wants to raise the gasoline tax by nearly 4 cents a gallon.

This messy budget, which over the months leading to the June 6 adjournment will be dissected, inspected, rejected and reanimated by the General Assembly, is exacerbated by the recession.

A 2003-style recovery would have brought in $650 million in additional income-tax revenue, plus $75 million more in sales taxes this year. But no.

In fact, projections as recently as 2010 indicated the state would have collected $300 million more in revenue than what the gasping economic landscape has been able to cough up this year.

So Malloy wants to extend a 20-percent corporate tax surcharge, a tax on electric generators and a tax on insurance premiums that were set to end on June 30. That continuance will be reflected in consumer rates while bringing in an estimated $140 million in the fiscal year that starts July 1 and $170 million in 2014-15.

There are some sops for taxpayers in there as well, like the partial restoration of the tax exemption on clothing under $25 come July 1, 2015 -- if we live that long -- and $50 a year later, saving consumers $56 million in the first year.

Another is the proposal to end local property taxes on automobiles valued less than $20,000, although homeowners will feel an added pinch when their real estate taxes go up accordingly.

Actually, that pinch will be lost in the punches from local government who, under this budget, may be forced to invest more money in local schools, meaning they'll need higher local property taxes to pay firefighters and cops.

The problem really is that Democratic majorities in the House and Senate conspired with the previous two Republican governors to keep increasing spending in the face of multibillion-dollar deficits that came home to roost when Malloy took office two years ago.

John "Why Should I Resign if I've Done Nothing Wrong?" Rowland was apparently too worried about taking care of friendly state contractors on his way to federal prison in 2005.

Then Democrats thoroughly bullied his successor, Jodi Rell, the reluctant governor who took office in July 2004 when Rowland slunk off in disgrace.

They refused to budge and let a billion-dollar deficit inflate like the Hindenberg (ask your grandparents; "the horror...the horror...") in 2009, to the point where the only thing left was to borrow for operating expenses.

The reality is that the governor's job is to propose a balanced budget and now it's up to elected lawmakers to make the real decisions. The battles will emerge where Malloy wants to make a fight. Last year it was school reform. This year it's going to be "refinancing" some of that 2009 debt, stretching payments out until 2018.

Another tricky area is Malloy's effort to bring the state around to Generally Accepted Accounting Practices. It was the subject of his first executive order, even as his inaugural speech was still echoing in the cavernous State Armory.

But the nuts-and-bolts of the transition means a pesky $1.2 billion budget cost, which at least the state was paying to itself. Malloy wants to sell off half of it for cash now, then delay payment on the bonds until the 2016-17 budget, midway through a hypothetical second term.

There are so many cliches it's almost comical, except at this point they're unimaginative: "the governor proposes and the Legislature disposes;" "the devil's in the details;" "it's a shell game;" "it's smoke and mirrors;" "it's kicking the can down the road;" or, privately, "it's only the taxpayers' money."

House Minority Leader Larry Cafero, R-Norwalk, pioneered a step or two into new territory, calling Malloy's budget "the mother of all shell games."

Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield, simply called it the "most dishonest" budget he's seen since first taking office in 1999.

Picture it this way: You bought a bunch of green bananas last week when Gov. Dan Malloy plopped his two-year vision of extended taxes, further borrowing and investments in education and job creation on to the desks of 151 House members and 36 senators.

The shelf life of an average governor's budget is really only a couple days and then that big amorphous blob called the Legislature gets down to work.

Four days later, the bananas might be ripe, while the governor's budget is decaying rapidly.